The human species is divided by gender into males and
females. Human reproduction is achieved by an act of procreation by a male
and a female. In principle, the act of procreation can occur between any
male and any female. In practice, there are some societal restrictions
against random copulation. In many human societies, gender relationship is
institutionalized by marriage, which is a process whereby one male and one
female enter into a formal partnership. This process may arise out of the need to
define and protect property and inheritance rights.

If that was the whole story, then we would have a complete
demographic characterization by identifying each person in the population as
either being married or unmarried. In practice, there are many other
conditions and exceptions. In the case of Latin America, we can argue that
the complexities are the result of the impact of the confluence of
three main types of cultures --- the European, the Indian and the African.

In the case of contemporary Latin America, we can list the
following marital states ---

(1) A single person

To be precise, this is a person who has never been married
before in either the civil or religious sense (thereby excluding anyone who may
be living alone now after being separated, divorced or widowed from a previous
marriage) and who is also not presently cohabitating with someone.

(2) A married person

To be precise, this is a person who has entered into a
marriage with a person of the opposite sex in either a civil or religious ceremony or both. As such, the person is presumed to possess certain
qualities (e.g. reached the age of consent at the time of the marriage, was not
a bigamist, etc), has signed the requisite documents in the presence of
witnesses and officials, paid a license fee (arancele and possibly other
gifts in the case of a religious ceremony) and the said marriage was duly entered into an official
registry with all its legal and/or religious ramifications.

We make the distinction between civil and religious marriages. In the early colonial days, marriage took place
only in the context of rituals conducted within the Catholic Church, as
matrimony is a sacrament like baptism or holy communion. From
the book by Christine Hunefeldt about spousal relationship in nineteenth-century
Lima, we read:

Everyone wishing to marry in church had to fulfill rituals
designed to control marriage and the conditions of marriage. There was
nothing easy about getting married. According to canon law, marriages
had to be announced and publicized. Banns (public announcement of the
proposed marriage) had to be published in widely read newspapers, read aloud
in one of Lima's main squares, or posted on the church's doors. People
were expected to step forward if they knew of any impediment to the marriage.

An important impediment was kinship. Kin to the fourth
degree, both in the ascending and in the descending line; collateral kin (that
is, one's future spouse's relatives); and even those people who had ritual
kinship as godparents in baptism and marriage were off-limits in regard to
sexual intercourse and marriage. If the bride or groom had had sexual
intercourse within the kinship network prior to marriage, they needed a
written dispensation to excuse the sin, and this document was included in the
matrimonial license file after penitence had been decreed upon the
transgressors. The close the kinship, the stricter the church's imposed
sanctions and penitence.

Religious vows, a promise to serve God as a priest or a nun,
were another impediment. Holy promises could not be easily retracted and
called for thorough soul-searching for all involved before a dispensation
could be granted. Another impediment was physical and mental illness,
which included sexual impotence and diseases; various forms of heresy, such as
witchcraft, atheism, and professing non-Catholic beliefs; and, more generally,
madness. If deviations or sicknesses could be proven, the couple could
not obtain a dispensation to marry. These impediments, particularly
sexual impotence, were used to annul marriages as well (presumably there was
no way of being aware of this impediment before marriage).

Catholic premarital rituals also required consent
declarations from both fathers for those who married before reaching
twenty-five years of age (after 1830, age twenty one). If the father had
died, the mother stepped in or, in her absence, the closest paternal male
relative. When parents did not agree to the impending marriage, they
expressed their dissent in writing. Church authorities carefully
scrutinized the objections. The church was aware that women were
sometimes forced into marriage by their parents, so a written consent signed
by the bride was also required.

Couple also presented to their priest birth certificates
stating their parishes of birth. If born in different parishes, they had
to marry in the woman's parish. At least two witnesses per person had to
be present at the ceremony. Moreover, witnesses declared in writing how
and for which length of time they had known each of the partners or
both. Church officials processed matrimonial files with great care, not
only because they gave the church moral leverage and control over people's
lives, but also because once the marriage had taken place, the presence of
unexcused impediments could be used by a spouse to petition for an
annulment. Because marriage was a sacrament, the church was interested
in avoiding allegations in hindsight.

In the late nineteenth century, Latin American
countries began to introduce laws that permit civil matrimony through
registration at governmental offices, with corresponding laws to address issues
of contracts, dowry, alimony, inheritance, divorce and spousal abuse.
Civil marriages are not accepted as valid by the Catholic Church, and vice
versa.

(3) A person in a consensual union (unión libre)

We read from the book by de Vos (see reference at the
bottom of the page):

... the clearest legacy that many societies have regarding
family structure from the Indian past is the marital custom of consensual
union. These are unions that may be sanctioned by a community but not
by a civil authority or by a church. Such unions may be stable and are
a common form of marital status in areas that are predominantly Indian.

The issue of consensual union is complicated, however,
because of the arrival of many African slaves in certain parts of
America. While most historical accounts of the Hispanic arrival in the
New World focus on political and economic issues, some nonetheless note that
there was substantial "intermarriage" between European/white men
and Indian or African women. There simply were many more
European/white men than women, and most of these men were not about to be celibate (or faithful
within marriage) under the circumstances. As a consequence, some
"consensual unions" were purely exploitative, facilitated by
perceived or real inequality and/or traditional outlooks, but others were
informal for other reasons (e.g., the difficulty or expense of making the
union formal, or laws against miscegenation or divorce). (p.7)

Consensual union is common; formal marriage may not even
have been an option for some people who wanted to form a union --- perhaps
because it had to be sanctioned by a priest, who may not even have been
available for a fee, or it could only be between two unmarried Catholics.
(p.157)

And from the book by Sarah LeVine, we read this narrative:

Inés goes on, "Young women today are much more
independent than we were because they're used to earning their own
money. If they don't like their husband's behavior, they tell him, 'I'm
leaving!" Her daughter, Nina, the administrator of a large Catholic
school in downtown Cuernavaca, did just that. She married a nice young
man with a good job, and they had a son. But when the boy was three, she
got a divorce. "She saw right away that her husband was too
attached to his mother, and it turned out that he was homosexual. After
leaving him, she became friends with Raul and they started living
together. Now they have a daughter, but Nina doesn't want to marry
him,"says Inés, with lingering incredulity. "She has her job
and she wants to keep her independence." Although poor Mexican
women may actually prefer to live in consensual union with a man, on the
grounds that in the absence of any formal tie, they retain more freedom, it is
something new for a lower-middle-class woman, typically the quintessence of
respectability, to choose such an arrangement. (p.125)

This definition of consensual union is a negative one
--- it refers to unions that are NOT admissible under the eyes of the law or
the church. As such, we have to point out that consensual union covers a
broad range of situations, some of which are stable arrangements (such as
common-law marriages) while others can be just fleeting liaisons.

(4) A separated person

To be precise, this is a person who was married formally in
civil and/or religious matrimony but is currently separated (but not formally
divorced) from the spouse. Usually, separation is a prelude to a formal
divorce but reconciliation is still possible. It should be noted that a
person who is separated from a partner in a consensual union is considered to
be single, but not separated.

(5) A divorced person

To be precise, this is a person who was married formally in
civil and/or religious matrimony but is now divorced from the spouse following
a formal process whereby the appropriate civil and/or religious authorities
have approved the divorce (or annulment).

In a religious divorce, the grounds for petitioning may seem to be fewer. According to catholic doctrine, Holy Matrimony is a
sacrament and is therefore indissoluble. In the words of Jesus Christ:
"What therefore God has joined together let no man put asunder."
(Gospel of Matthew 19:3-9). So even if a couple agreed to a separation,
their religious marriage remains in place and they can never remarry in
church. However, in practice, when you consider the detailed
requirements for a religious marriage ceremony, there are plenty of loopholes
to obtain an annulment if one has the knowledge and resources --- for example, one of the
matrimonial witness may sign an affidavit to the effect that his place of
residence was not that which was indicated on the marriage license; one
spouse may confess to having sexual intercourse with a near kin for which
dispensation had not been properly obtained; and so on.

Again, from Hunefeldt's book, we read:

... in 1854 María Bruque found out, after fifteen years of
marriage, that her husband had had sexual relations with her mother and that
this was known to everyone but herself. The marriage was annulled
because no dispensation had been requested at the time of the wedding and
because the couple had married in a different parish from that in which María
was born.

(6) A widowed person

To be precise, this is a person who was married formally in
civil and/or religious matrimony but whose spouse is now deceased.

We will now refer to some data from the 1999-2000 TGI
Latina study. The relevant database consists of
37,470 survey respondents between the ages of 20 and 64 in seven countries:
Argentina, Brazil, Chile (Santiago), Colombia, Mexico, Peru (Lima) and Venezuela
(Caracas). The distribution of marital status is shown in the pie chart
below.

(source: TGI Latina)

LIFE COURSE AND MARITAL STATUS

There are more interesting ways of looking at marital status
beyond just taking a snapshot as we just did. In particular, marital
status is expected to change over the course of the lifetime. The most
typical scenario would be a person who is single upon reaching adulthood, gets
married and either dies before the spouse or becomes a widow if the spouse dies
first.

There are many other possible deviations from this scenario
--- a person may be single for the entire life; or a person may experience
multiple marital events in the course of lifetime, such as this sequence: single
>> marriage >> separation >> divorce >> re-marriage
>> widowhood.

In the following chart, we show the distributions of marital
status for different age groups. This is still a cross-sectional snapshot
of the moment at which this survey was conducted, but it does show how marital
status distributions varies greatly by age. Thus, the majority of young
people (persons 20 to 24 years old) are still single. As people grow
older, that they are more likely to be married. Since separation, divorce
and widowhood can occur only after marriage, their incidences also increase with
age. Widowhood is the consequence of the death of the spouse, and
mortality rate increases with age.

(source: TGI Latina)

CLASS & GENDER RELATIONSHIPS

In Latin America, it is impossible to understand gender
relationships without considering class, and class can be considered in the
historical context. Here is an excerpt of Muriel Nazzari's article Sex/Gender
Arrangements And The Reproduction of Class In the Latin American Past
collected in Elizabeth Dore's book (see reference at the bottom of this page):

Most Latin American women exercised their reproductive roles
and lived within highly structured sex/gender arrangements. In colonial
times and in the early nineteenth century, these arrangements included the
system of family honor, which both prescribed gender roles and stratified
society, thereby reproducing class.

The word "honor" had meanings at two different
levels: status and virtue. The honorable status of a family of the
colonial elite was gained through ascription if ascendants had belonged to the
conquistadors or early settlers or if the crown had granted them privileges in
return for services. It was also inherited through purity of blood, that
is, genealogical proof that there was no mixture of Jewish, Moorish, Indian,
or black blood in one's ancestry. The honorable status of these families
was maintained with the circumspect behavior of their members and their
refusal to participate in manual labor.

Honor as virtue also reflected on the entire family as a
corporate group, but in contrast to honor as status, it had different
definitions according to gender. The men of a family were honorable when
they were manly, honest, and loyal, and exercised their authority over family
and subordinates wisely. Women's honor was mostly related to their
sexual conduct: they should retain their virginity until they married, and as
wives they should be chaste and faithful. They should also be concerned
with their reputation, and discreet in the presence of men. If women
deviated from this code they were considered shameless, and this shamelessness
dishonored the whole family.

Yet colonial society had contradictory expectations.
The honor system led men to protect the women in their own family from sexual
assault, and thereby preserve the family honor, whereas contemporary views on
masculinity led them to seduce women in other families, thereby dishonoring
them. Men's sense of virility rose as a function of how many women they
were able to conquer.

This contradiction meant the honor system would not work
without the sexual laxity of some women. These tended to be lower-class
women because they were less secluded and less protected than upper-class
women. Many may have also made calculated choices between illicit
relationships with an upper-class man and marriage with a man of their own
class.

This sex/gender system of honor therefore functioned not
only to differentiate women from men but also to divide persons by
class. The colonial elite distinguished between people who had honor,
gente decente, and people who did not, gente baja. Thus when a woman
chose or accepted a relationship of concubinage, she lost her honor and
reinforced her lower-class status. Because of the double standard
implicit in this gender system, upper-class men did not lose their honor if
they had concubines of an inferior class or race, only if they married them.

A marriage system based on endogamy was thus at the root of
the gender system of honor, and endogamy was also a sex/gender arrangement
that reproduced class. Men and women were expected to marry their
equals, and were there any inequality in status or property between spouses,
it was the wife who should be superior to her husband and not
vice-versa. The mechanism used to enforce this system was the dowry.

However things did not remain the same.

... marriage was transformed from mostly a property relation
between class equals to a marriage based on the personal relationship between
the spouses, in which wives were usually economically dependent on their
husbands. At the same time, the honor system was considerable weakened
and tended to disappear, and the practice of arranged marriage and dowry
declined.

These changes in the way classes were reproduced,
specifically in the way the ruling class was reproduced, entailed a kind of
marriage that was much more like concubinage than was the previous system, in
which wives contributed substantially to the support of their new families with
a dowry. They also represented the transformation from a system of
patriarchalism, in which one male not only had authority over the females in
his family but also over all younger males, including married sons and
nephews, and sometimes even cousins, to a system of patriarchy restricted to
the nuclear family, in which the male had power only over his wife, unmarried
daughters, and minor sons. The new patriarchy allowed individual men
much more independence from their families of origin to choose a wife or
pursue a career, leaving individual women freer to choose a husband, but
without the support and protection of their fathers, brothers, and families of
origin, who could no longer exert patriarchal authority over their
sons-in-laws.

Marriage became a strictly personal matter. On one
hand, women of the propertied class gained the freedom to choose their husbands, but lost the right to receive a dowry from their parents, that is,
the wherewithal to contribute to the support of the new family, so they became
instead their husbands' dependents. On the other hand, women with no
property benefited from the change, for it increased their chances of
marrying. Demographic studies confirm that as the nineteen century
progressed, a greater percentage of the adult population married ...
Though marriage, an institution that regulated gender relations, no longer
separated people by class as starkly as it had in the past, to this day there
are more never-married persons in the lower classes than in the upper.

In the following chart, we show the distribution of marital
status by socio-economic status. Level A refers to the top 10%, Level B to
the next 20%, Level C to the next 30% and Level D to the bottom 40% of the
population. These Levels are determined from a scoring scheme based upon
household goods and services and head of household characteristics.

(source: TGI Latina)

Here are some observations:

The incidence of single persons does not differ too much by
socio-economic status. The 25% singlehood in the top 10% group is just
marginally lower than the 26% in the other socio-economic groups.

The incidence of married persons increases significantly
with socio-economic status whereas the incidence of consensual union decreases
significantly with socio-economic status. On one hand, in the eyes of
the elite, the idea of cohabitating without a proper marriage may be
scandalous. On the other hand, the poor may find it unnecessary or
impossible to find the money or possess the proper documentation to have a proper wedding.

The incidences of widowed persons decreases by
socio-economic status. In Latin America, mortality rates are vastly
different according to socio-economic status, as the elite class lives more
comfortably, gets better food and nutrition and has access to better health
and medical resources. Thus, the likelihood of having the spouse
deceased is higher among the lower socio-economic group.